Despite the tremendous successes we’ve had
in the past few years, several recent anarchist mobilizations have been
hijacked by a shrill minority that wishes to impose permits, routes,
parade marshals (e.g. peace police), zones of actions and other such
nonsense, turning our rage and creativity into a well-ordered media
spectacle, or worse, mass arrest. The constant and insincere calls for
“solidarity” and protecting others have turned our once
raucous resistance into an exercise of well-organized crowd control.

But it hasn’t always been like this…

Just a few years ago the military’s pet think-tank RAND organization
wrote:

“Anarchists [in Seattle 1999] using extremely good modern communications,
including live Internet feeds, were able to execute simultaneous actions
by means of pulsing and swarming tactics coordinated by networked and
leaderless “affinity groups.” Rather it became an example
of the challenges that hierarchical organizations face when confronting
networked adversaries with faster reaction cycles. This loosely organized
coalition, embracing network organization and tactics, frustrated police
efforts to gain the situational awareness needed to combat the seemingly
chaotic Seattle disturbances. “

RAND concludes that there is little that hierarchical organizations
like the police can do to deal with such chaotic tactics. In addition,
they sound the alarm that our types of groups facilitate rapid evolution
of tactics and promote greater recruiting opportunities than traditional
demonstrations. They are afraid and they had right to be: we were winning.
Fortunately, today, we still can win.

We gain nothing returning to the tactics of ten years ago: the scripted,
bland and boring traditional leftist demonstrations of parade routes,
leaders, speakers and marshals. What we need is creative, decentralized
and, most of all, chaotic action.

One tactic used in Seattle and elsewhere that utilizes chaos is “pulsing”.
Pulsing is the ability of groups of people to come together, disperse
to safety and reform in new groups. While this is similar to guerrilla
tactic of “absorption,” there is an important difference.

Che’s notion of “absorption” is simply when a “force
attacks the enemy for a period of time and then breaks off the attack
being absorbed into the community or environment” from where it
came. Pulsing is a constant flow of people joining, breaking up and
rejoining, often in new combinations of groups. The most successful
way this can be done is through small decentralized autonomous groups
(e.g. affinity groups) that have the decision-making power to decide
for themselves when and with whom to interact with.

RAND points out that pulsing makes crowd control very difficult because
it keeps “rearranging the threats” and that there is no
prearranged pattern that police can analyze and neutralized. This is
unpredictability is the cornerstone of chaos theory.

A biological example beloved by chaos theoreticians is bacteria. Bacteria
function in pulses, creating ever-new patterns of connections. Chaos
thinker Planc wrote “Each pattern is organic and results from
random forces in the environment the ever-changing collection and density
[pulsing] of bacteria makes their organizations very durable and adaptable.”

“Swarming” is another way we can inject chaos into our
actions. Swarming is the tactic of hitting a number of targets at the
same time without following a pre-set pattern. Decentralized swarming
frustrates law enforcement’s ability to protect targets and disrupt
our activities. They are forced into “reaction” as opposed
to their goal of “controlling the agenda for protests”.
Again, the only way for this to work with thousands of people is for
us to organize in a radically decentralized manner. Decentralizing work
and actions by the channels of affinity allows the skills and passions
of small groups to be utilized best, so that the groups select actions
that match their interests and abilities.

In demonstrations, hierarchical organizations are quickly overwhelmed
when their central nervous system is confronted by the chaos caused
by unpredictable, pulsing swarms. Anarchists can take advantage of these
matrices of opportunity opened up by autonomous groups, giving us a
huge advantage over slow reacting, hierarchical groups like the police.

Both pulsing and swarming inject the crucial element of chaos into
our demonstrations. Police are repulsed by chaos, as are all hierarchical
organizations, and thus are slower to react. These tactics provide affinity
groups opportunities that they could have never planned for: like liberating
unguarded dumpster next to a checkpoint that can be turned into a battering
ram or finding an unlocked service entrance into a hotel where IMF delegates
are staying.

Chaos also allows small actions to be multiplied and expanded on. Even
small initial changes can accumulate quickly creating profound and unlikely
changes- such as a butterfly flapping its wings in Argentina may cause
a hurricane in New York.

We are not robots, we are not pawns of organizers: we are a pulsing
swarm of creative and free butterflies. We are fighting for our lives
and dancing to be free.